Hi all,
Not a computer guru by no means but i thought i'd tell you my experience.
Heres the story,lookin to make a gaming rig when i come across the gateway at costco.
It really looked promising on the outside when you look at the specs.
i7 920 @2.67 (should be able to oc that up over 3,yeah right)
9 gb ram
1tb hd
1gb radeon4870(again oc it)
able to crossfire
extra pci and pci express slots available
onboard 7.1 audio with sound blaster xfi

I go ahead and buy it and of course the first thing i do is open it up when i get home.

Psu is only 450w so crossfire is out unless you want to upgrade a brand new system just out of the box.
Bios is locked out so no oc for you.
4870 is probably made by sapphire and i know that only by the heatsink used as card is stripped of any manufacturer information.
gateway low end micro atx motherboard with again no information to be found on board itself.
Heatsink on cpu almost looks like a thermalite but who knows what kind off knock off version it is.

No installation or backup cd's at all.
Manual in box was in french,i finally found the english version on a pdf file at gateway.
keybord second function keys are in french as well.
Mouse is a junky optical scroll mouse that had to be worked on before left click would work.

The rest is the same as any gateway fx 6800 model,just the cpu,gpu,and ram changes.

Instllation of windows vista 64bit ultimate home was somewhat painfree as all you do is select you're language on fist bootup and hit enter as it's stored on the hard drive and formats itself and then loads up.

Then it was just like any other os,wait for updates and install what ever else you want.

Problems started almost immediately with bsod's happening on a regular basis with infinite loops and driver and hardware failures.It's so common that a session without a bsod is actually a small victory.

Uninstalled and reinstalled video drivers numerous times to no avail.
Gateway support is in india somewhere an all they want you to do is a clean install and try again.(gateway recovery in their language).They don't want to tackle the issue of a possible bad video card.
If i could keep this stable i would give you benchmarks as it is i think all i'm gonna do is chuck it back to costco after i reformat it to get rid of anything i might have been able to install between crashes.

I hope I am an anomaly with this but i have a feeling i'm not.I didn't know at the time Gateway was acquired by acer and are now marketing a clone of the gateway fx6800 with acer on the front of the case and the fx removed.
I'm going to use the refund to make my own oc able system.

That it for my rant let me know if you agree or disagree with my ramble.

Did you check with costco's special service for electronics? They have their own customer care folks for electronics purchased at Costco that goes over and above what the manufacturer offers. Maybe you'll get more satisfaction from them.